


Marked Your Card

by Sapphy



Series: The Eternal Batman Universe [8]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Future, Anal Sex, Bloodplay, Canon-Typical Violence, Consensual, Declarations Of Love, Drinking, First Dates, First Time, Future Fic, Hair-pulling, Immortality, Knifeplay, Lipstick & Lip Gloss, M/M, Melancholy, Non-Consensual Bondage, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Obsessive Behavior, Oral Fixation, Oral Sex, Rough Sex, Scarification, Star-crossed, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence, this is really hard to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-10-18
Packaged: 2018-04-12 10:09:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4475417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/Sapphy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's change in the air, and the Joker is getting restless. Bruce spends a night with his clown, before the chance is lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First a major warning: I haven't finished this story yet, I'm just hoping that posting chapter one and getting feedback will give me the impetus to get on and finish chapters two and three. EDIT: I did finish it! Yay me
> 
> Secondly a smalled warning: this story does (for the first time in the series) contain sexual content, alongside the usual Joker weirdness and violence. The sexual contact happens under the influence of alcohol, but is consensual. Some of the other stuff that happens, not so much.
> 
> That said, chapter one is very tame.
> 
> And finally an explanation. The expression 'marked his/her/your/etc card' has two meanings. It can mean to arrange to dance with someone (from 19th century formal balls when girls would carry a card with a list of the dances on it and men would literally mark the card, so that you didn't get thirty guys all rushing up to the prettiest girl when a song started), but it can also mean that you are planning to attack or even kill someone. I'm sure you see why that's so fitting to these two.
> 
> This won't make much sense if you haven't read previous stories in this series, in particular Tread Softly and Files from the Archives chapter 1.
> 
> Song: Stuck in the Middle with You - any version. The lyrics are perfect for this story.
> 
> And as always, if you've got any questions about this universe, just ask!

The restaurant is small, tucked away on the fringes of China Town, far enough away from the bright lights to be empty even on a Saturday evening. It's somewhere Bruce has been a few times, since he was given an extremely good free takeaway during patrol one night as thanks for protecting the restaurant from some hoodlums.

The man who'd owned it then is long dead, his grandson now running the place, but the food is just as good, too traditionally Sichuanese for a lot of Gothamites, but Bruce has a high tolerance for spice, and Joker will add chillies to practically anything, given half a chance.

It's not Bruce's favourite restaurant in the city. He's a little worried that, despite his promises to be good, the evening is going to end with Joker burning the place to the ground and if that happens he doesn't want to lose any of the places he eats at regularly.

They've got a good table, since they're the only ones in, one with good lines of sight on every exit. Bruce is facing the kitchen, making it easier to catch the server's eye, Joker sitting opposite him in the hope that the wait staff won't look too closely at him. His face has been on the news lately, as reports on Arkham's first breakout in a nearly a decade cover every channel, and Bruce doesn't want their evening spoiled by someone recognising his dinner companion as a supposedly long dead super-villain.

Joker's made up just enough not to raise too many eyebrows, although it's unlikely anyone will be looking at his face when he's wearing the purple tuxedo.

It's not horrifically vivid, might even be called tasteful, at least compared to the rest of Joker's wardrobe, but it's definitely noticeable. In a fit of unusual restraint he's paired it with a shirt in a slightly darker shade of purple, and a black tie which Bruce is pretty sure is his.

His wild mop of green hair has been combed and oiled, so that it hangs in a neat ponytail rather its usual mane like tangles, and his makeup is just enough to make him pass for human, a touch of eyeliner the only concession to his usual feminine appearance.

He looks eccentric, and still decidedly odd looking with his lugubrious face and spindly limbs, but attractive too. Bruce thinks the looks they've been getting from the server have more to do with them being two men than Joker's colourful appearance.

Bruce himself had actually acquired a tux of his own for this little outing, sending his measurements to one of Gotham's old established tailors. It had been a challenge, getting it ordered and collected without Joker realising, but it had been worth it for the look of surprise on the clown's face when he saw Bruce dressed up.

He's worn tailored suits all his life, but he's always had a particular loathing for tuxedos, the associations with pointless vapid parties, and picking up pointless vapid women, too strong.

This is different though, going out already with a... companion. (Not a date, this isn't a date no matter what Joker says). There's no expectations on him tonight, no watching eyes, the only worry whether he'll be able to keep Joker from killing anyone, and that's a pretty small worry. These days Joker tends to be pretty docile so long as he feels Bruce is giving him enough attention.

Bruce is letting Joker order, which is resulting in his eating all the hottest dishes on the menu, while Joker watches him closely for any sign of discomfort. It's childish and petty, but harmless, and since Bruce is enjoying the food so far, he doesn't say anything.

He’d intended to order green tea, but Joker had forestalled him by calling for rice wine, and Bruce is actually enjoying the complex smoky flavour. He's become more willing to drink alcohol in the last fifty years, and while he's not intending to get drunk, he feels comfortable having a drink or two.

Joker is knocking the small glasses back at a rate of knots, but it doesn't seem to be affecting him, and Bruce thinks it's likely that his immunity to toxins includes alcohol.

Their waitress quietly clears away the dirty dishes while Joker talks. He's telling Bruce about the first time his gang went up against Croc, something Bruce had missed at the time, and despite himself Bruce can feel a grin catching at the corners of his mouth. Joker is an engaging storyteller, with great comic timing and, when he feels like being charming, an unerring instinct for what will amuse Bruce.

"And then," he says, leaning back a little to allow the waitress to remove his plate, "Croc leaps out the water and says, "No, _that’s_ the rock."

Bruce laughs. The story had been unusually tame for Joker, but not featuring a single maiming or death, and he knows Joker is doing it on purpose, turning on all his considerable charm and doing all he can to bend to Bruce's whims. Bruce knows why, and he's trying not to think about it. He's still trying to convince himself that the strange attraction he feels to Joker doesn't mean anything, but it's getting harder and harder to convince himself. Joker obviously thinks he's getting laid tonight, hence the toned down clothes and the charm, and Bruce isn't sure how to deal with the knowledge that he's been so obvious in his attraction.

He’s jerked from his reflection by Joker hitting him, relatively gently, with a desert spoon. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“Over thinking. I don’t know what was going on in that noggin of yours, Brucie baby, but I could see the cogs whirring from here. Relax. This is supposed to be a fun evening out, remember? Have a drink.”

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” Bruce asks, amused. It’s a ploy a lot of people have attempted over the years, and it’s never once worked.

“I’ve always wanted to know what you’re like drunk,” Joker says, unashamed. “Do you giggle? I bet you giggle.”

Bruce has only ever once been drunk, back in his college days. He’d gone to a freshman mixer, got completely plastered on cheap champagne cocktails and vomited on a yucca plant. He doesn’t remember much of what happened after that, though he has a vague feeling he might have hit on the school’s star quarter back. The memory was enough to put him off drinking for the rest of his life. He’s been sexually attracted to a grand total of three people in his life, and the knowledge that liquor made him act like, well, like a normal person, hitting on pretty people he barely knew and who couldn’t kill anyone, had been enough to put him off for life.

“That’s one hell of a rueful expression, lamb chop. Don’t tell me you’re a horny drunk? Even my luck isn’t that good.”

Bruce could feel that damn blush rising. It was faint, so faint not even Dick would have spotted it, but Joker had eyes like a hawk, and he never really stopped watching Bruce.

“You are! Oh my, it really is my lucky day. What say you after this we go find a nightclub. One that sells fluorescent coloured drinks with umbrellas in them.”

“You’re not getting me drunk, Joker,” Bruce growled, keeping his voice low to avoid the staff hearing the name. “Just how stupid do you think I am?” He flushed even further at the thought though. That strange part of him he’d discovered in the tunnels under Arkham, the part that wanted to submit to this madman, liked the idea. Liked the idea of letting Joker take advantage.

“You’re so cute when you blush,” Joker said, grinning. “Say, did I ever tell you about the time I caught you and kitty cat going at it on a rooftop?”

Bruce has a moment of panic, before he remembers that he and Selina had only slept together twice, and both times had involved a bed. “Never happened.”

“No,” Joker agreed. “I just wanted to know if you ever had. How boring. I was sure you must have an exhibitionist streak, all those bugs and cameras. But maybe you’re a voyeur, hmm?”

“Joker, this is hardly suitable conversation for the dinner table,” Bruce growls, aware as he says it that it makes him sound like somebody’s maiden aunt.

Joker chuckles. “You’re showing your age darling. No one these days worries about things like that. But have it your way. What shall we talk about, hmm? The weather perhaps? How about rising property prices?”

“What do you know about either topic?”

“Oh, nothing, I live in a cave. But that’s the sort of thing civilised people discuss over their spotty tofu, isn’t it?”

He leans back, allowing the waitress to set down a dish in the centre of the table.

“Ma Po Dofu,” Bruce corrects him.

“Ooo Brucey, speak foreign to me,” Joker says with a grin.

“Do you speak any other languages?” Bruce asks suddenly, realising that he doesn’t know.

“Define speak,” Joker replies, helping himself to a liberal serving. “I can read and write 18, and understand 12 when spoken, but I never bothered trying to speak any of them myself.”

“Why not? If you can already understand them…”

“Image, Batsy. It’s all about image. People underestimate, me, they always have. Except you of course. And that’s the way I like it. They remember my body count, but they forget that that must mean I’m clever. If I let it be known that I speak 12 languages, GCPD would start treating me like an actual threat. IGA wouldn’t let me escape! And then where   
would we be?”

“A lot more people would still be alive,” Brice points out. He’s been trying to keep Batman out of the evening’s conversation, but it’s impossible when his dinner companion is the Joker.

“But then just think how much worse the overcrowding would be! It’s already standing room only in most of the city. You know, BC told me the other day that a company applied for planning permission to develop Robinson park. Robinson Park! Half the plants in there attack anyone who gets close, and the homeless children have started their own tribal society!”

“BC?” Bruce asks, raising an eyebrow. Who on earth would Joker have been talking about planning applications with?

“Well I couldn’t just keep calling her the Bat Computer, now could I, not when we’ve grown so close. Hell, we even watch porn together. That’s when you know a friendship is real.”

“You watch porn with the Bat Computer?!”

“Well, more on than with, and more your celebrity sex tapes than porn, but you get the idea.”

Bruce sighs. “How many times have you watched those?”

Joker shrugs. “Lost count after the fourth time. Ooo, can we make a celebrity sex tape? I’ve never been in a home movie that didn’t involve extortion.”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” Bruce tells him.

“So that’s a maybe? Heh, I’ll talk you round in the end. I can be very… persuasive.”

And God, Bruce is a sick sick man for how that makes him flush, makes his cheeks heat up and his pulse flutter. Joker is a monster, and his ideas of persuasion range from blackmail to torture, but Bruce’s mind has gone straight to that strange heated moment they shared in the caves beneath Arkham Assylum, the way he’d gone pliant before the Clown’s desire.

Joker notices. Of course he does.

“Bruce darling, if you’re going to look at me like that, things are going to… escalate,” he says, his voice caressing the last word. “I’ve been looking forward to tonight, and I’d hate for it to end with us being arrested for public indecency, but I cannot be held responsible for my actions when you’re all but begging me to fuck you.”

Bruce couldn’t help the indignant denial that forced itself out of his lips, even though he knew acknowledging Joker’s… flirting was a bad idea.

“You’re a terrible liar sweetcheeks,” Joker says, grinning at him happily. “Want some Dofu?”

His accent is flawless, and Bruce wonders if the clown had been lying about speaking other languages, or whether it’s his talent for mimicry showing itself. He doesn’t often use it, perfectly happy in his own skin, but Joker is a skilled actor with a remarkable ear for voices. He’d once worked at Arkham Asylum in disguise for a year without anyone spotting him. Bruce had met him several times, as both Batman and Bruce Wayne, and never suspected a thing.

Joker’s right, he’s easy to underestimate, and forgetting just how good a liar he is is the most fatal mistake. He makes such a show of wearing his heart on his sleeve that the unwary start to believe he’s incapable of real deceit. Bruce had made that mistake in the past. Never again.

Wordlessly he holds out his bowl for Joker to fill.

They ate in silence for a few minutes, Bruce focussing on the half forgotten flavours and textures. The last few months he’s been subsisting on various combinations of Joker’s brightly coloured groceries, and before that it had been long years of ration packs. He honestly can’t remember when he’d last experienced the firm but soft texture of tofu, or the numbing heat of Szechuan flower pepper.

Tim had enjoyed the kind of fiercely hot food you found in East Asia, he remembers, and so had Cassie. More than once he’d watched them share a carton of takeaway after a patrol, Steph and Dick pulling faces at the spiciness. Even Dami…

“Do you like it?” Bruce asks, to distract himself from things he’d rather not focus on. “I didn’t actually ask if you enjoyed Chinese food.”

“Oh, I’m not fussy,” Joker says. “And I like anything really spicy. I suspect that bath I took, back before I was me, did something to my taste buds. Not that I know for sure, memories a little sketchy, you know how it is, but as best as I can work it out, tastes are… muted, for me. Bland.”

“Hence the smoked fish and the blue cheese?” Bruce asked, interested. He’d never considered the possibility that Joker’s senses had been affected, but there was no reason for it not to be true. Joker gained nothing by lying.

“Stronger the flavour, the better I can taste it. Don’t know that I’m getting all the complexities of the dish,” he added, gesturing to the tofu with his chop sticks, “but at least it tastes of something.”

“What about the wine?” It had a subtle aroma, nothing like the strong hits of flavour Joker favoured.

“Might as well be water,” Joker replied cheerfully. “But I’m determined to get you drunk Batsy baby, and you aren’t the type to drink alone.” He topped off both of their glasses as he spoke, then downed the contents of his in one gulp.

“And the marshmallows?” Bruce asked, hoping to distract Joker from his ridiculous plans for deflowering Bruce. “They don’t taste of much even to normal people.”

They’re empty calories, which he tries to avoid, but even Batman needs something sweet, and he’s been known to steal some of Joker’s when the clown’s asleep, or absorbed in his ridiculous telenovelas.

“Squishy,” Joker says, enunciating the word carefully, like he’s testing the feel of it in his mouth. “Sticky. If they only made them with some actual flavour, they’d be perfect. Jerk spice flavour.”

Bruce can’t keep from wrinkling his nose at the idea, but he has to concede that they’d probably sell like hotcakes, even if they’d mostly be given as gag gifts.

“Well if you ever decide to give up crime,” he suggests, gracing Joker with a small smile.

“I tried catering. It wasn’t for me.”

“You posed as a caterer to get into the mayor’s birthday party, that’s not the same. Or I hope not. You didn’t actually cook any of the food did you?”

“Oh no, of course not. That’s what hostages are for. I did spike the food with laxatives and aphrodisiacs though.”

Brice winces. He’s glad he decided to stake the party out as Batman rather than attending as Bruce. Although now he thinks about it, he has a feeling Tim had attended. He’d never mentioned anything about any aphrodisiacs. Or the laxatives.

Without really noticing it, they’ve finished the dofu, and the small bottle of rice wine.

Joker sucks excess sauce off his chopsticks, and then very theatrically vanishes them, presumably up a sleeve. Bruce lets him. He’ll pat him down later.

“So,” Joker says, cocking his head to one side and smiling the small intimate smile Bruce likes to imagine was just for him. “You going to invite me out for desert?”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just two quick notes, firstly to warn you all the this chapter contains explicit sexual content.
> 
> Secondly to stress that everything that happens in this chapter in consensual. Neither of then are drunk enough to not be able to give informed consent, and there isn't any sex pollen. That last one night seem odd, but it will make sense.
> 
> Oh, and Brey is named for Breyito, how left a comment asking for more jealous Bruce. As for why they're genderqueer? I just felt like it. I hope you like them, because this may not be the last we see of them.
> 
> Enjoy, and please comment x

Bruce pays the bill wirelessly, something he hates doing even though it’s been the norm for nearly five decades (far too traceable) and leaves an exactly calculated tip. He wants this visit to be as unmemorable as possible, so he carefully works an amount that won’t seem either mean enough to cause complaint or generous enough to cause comment.  
Joker disappears into the bathroom while Bruce pays, and he waits nervously to see whether he’ll come back.

His clown is planning something, he’s felt it in the air since they rescued Sopporo. That little taste of freedom, the reminder of the power and adrenaline that used to be Joker’s every day, had been too tempting to resist. Bruce spends his nights on edge, never sure if Joker is going to be there when he gets back. He’d never admit it, under any circumstances, but he breathes a sigh of relief every single time he comes back to that shock of green hair peeking out over the top of the blankets.

(More than once he’s considered sliding into the tangled nest of clothes and blankets instead of his own cold cot. Remembered the soft warm feeling of Joker falling asleep against his chest. He feels gut-wrenchingly guilty for even contemplating it, but working with Scandal has reminded him sharply how lonely he’s been).

Joker, when he reappears, declares the evening only just beginning, and Bruce, starkly aware that his time with the madman is coming to an end, indulges him.

They end up at the sort of trendy bar Millionaire Playboy Bruce Wayne used to frequent. This one has gone for an all black look, black walls and floors black bar, black seats. It’s deliberately retro, very 2030s with its monochrome color scheme and mood lighting, but Bruce rather likes it, despite the pretentiousness.

It’s busy, but not so full that Bruce’s expensive suit doesn’t get them nodded straight through. Bruce Wayne might have been dead for decades, but Bruce will never truly shake the air of old money that he’s worn from birth.

They get a booth on the upper mezzanine, looking down onto the dancers below. It’s far away enough from main part of the club that the music is quiet enough to allow them to talk, and it gives them both a good view of possible hostiles, and exits.

Joker flags down a server to order their drinks, two vodka martinis “and tell the barman to stir the hell out of them”, and when they’re gone he tugs the band out his hair, running his fingers through it to restore it from a neat ponytail to his familiar wild mane.

“Why don’t you cut it?” Bruce asks, as Joker finger combs some of the gel out of it. “You never had it long before.”

“You gotta embrace change, Brucey,” Joker says. “Besides, things are different now. It’s only fitting that I look different. I’ve always been a believer in dressing for the occasion.”

Bruce remembers some of the more outrageous outfits he’s seen the clown wear, and can’t help smiling. “The roller-blading craze of the 2020s,” he says, and Joker grins at him.

“I was thinking more of when cross-dressing was in in the 30s,” he says. “Shame that didn’t last longer, I had some lovely frocks.”

Bruce remembers, all too well. Boney white legs, with their fine covering of green hairs, sticking out from luridly colored miniskirts. Not Joker’s most flattering look.

“I’m just glad you weren’t out on the streets two years ago,” he says.

“You mean the hologram clothes thing?” Joker asked with a grin. “It was very mean of you keeping me locked up for that. Just think of all the fun me and BC could have had with that!”

“BC,” and he’s not sure how he feels about the nickname, but it’s certainly less conspicuous than saying ‘the Bat Computer’ in public, “wouldn’t do anything of the sort.”

“I’ve been teaching her about jokes,” Joker says earnestly. “She already knew sarcasm, but as we all know, that is the lowest form of wit. I spend all of last Tuesday explaining to her why the laughing fish are funny.”

Bruce has to actually bite his own lip to keep from grinning at the memory. The Joker Fish incident had left seven dead, but the idea of it _was_ funny. Patenting fish. It was such a ridiculous idea.

Joker smiles, that freakishly wide grin that used to be the most feared sight in Gotham. “I always knew you thought that was funny really,” he says, sounding unbearably smug.  
Bruce wants to kiss the smirk off his lips.

“So,” he says quickly, and then realizes he doesn’t know what he’s going to say, only that he wants to change to subject to something that makes Joker less happy and therefore less attractive.

(Although come to think about it, Joker’s pretty damn attractive when he’s angry, and Bruce has never seen him really sad, but he’s willing to bet he’s twisted enough to find that attractive too. He wonders what Joker looks like when he cries? In his very occasional fantasies he’s always the victim, the passive partner, and that’s all his conscience will let him be. But now he can’t help imaging holding Joker down and fucking him so long and slow that he cries).

“You’re doing that face again, the one that says you’re thinking about fucking me,” Joker says, staring at him intently. “Don’t test my patience, darling, I’m not famed for my self-control. You wouldn’t like the consequences if you push me.”

“You’re imagining things,” Bruce says firmly. “I’ve never looked at you like that in my life.”

“Denial, thy name is Batsy,” Joker replies, sounding amused. “You’ve wanted to fuck me since we were both mortal, you’ve just only realized it recently.”

“I do not want to fuck you,” Bruce says, a little too loudly.

There’s a slight cough, and he looks up to see a young server blushing and holding two martinis.

“Your drinks,” they say awkwardly, and set them on the table. Then they (Bruce can’t work out if they’re male or female under their uniform of long skirt and black button-down) take a deep breath like they’re gathering their courage, and say to Joker, “If you can’t change his mind, I get off at two.”

Joker grins and leans in just a little, ruby eyes glittering enticingly in the low light. “Well are you just the sweetest thing. I could just eat you up.”

The server’s eyes go wide, and they lick their lips, like they’d like that very much.

“What’s your name cutey?”

“B, Brey,” they stammer out, looking a little shell-shocked. Being the focus of all of Joker’s considerable charisma can do that to a person.

“Well Brey, if Brucey here doesn’t change his mind, I might just take you up on that.”

He winks, and Bruce grits his teeth and digs his fingers into the palms of his hands. He will not attack this person. They’re barely more than a child, and it isn’t their fault they picked the worst person imaginable to flirt with. There’s no reason he should want to punch them.

“Thank you, Brey,” he says sharply, a clear dismissal.

The kid jumps, like they’d forgotten anyone else but them and Joker existed, and blushes. “I… yeah, um, yeah. Okay. Bye.”

They shuffle off, giving Joker one last longing look, and Bruce relaxes his hands.

“Was that really necessary?” Bruce demands, angry with himself for being angry, angry with Joker for flirting like that when he’s on a date with Bruce. Not that it is a date. But Joker thinks it is. So he shouldn’t be flirting like that with other people.

“Darling,” Joker purrs, delightedly, “are you jealous? That’s adorable. You know I have eyes only for you. True, we’ve both had our little affairs over the years, but we always come back to one another in the end, so why worry? And besides, the girl is cute, but she’s hardly a match for you.”

“They were a girl?” Bruce asks, temporarily distracted.

“Certainly. Today at least. Whether that’s always the case, I couldn’t say. She had a… changeable look about her.”

They sit in slightly awkward silence for a time, sipping their martinis. It’s been decades since Bruce last had a cocktail, and he’d forgotten how much he enjoys the complex almost savory flavor of a good martini.

Below them, luridly dressed young men and women writhe together on the dance floor, reveling in the music, and the lights, and the sheer joy of being young.

“We’re so old,” Bruce says suddenly, surprising himself. “Do you ever just stop and think about how old we are?”

“It’s easier just to forget,” Joker tells him, eyes intent on Bruce’s face and lit with something that could almost be sympathy. “You let yourself start thinking about things like that, it’ll drive you mad.”

“How can I not? Look at them all, down there. They’re so young. I can’t even remember being that young. I’ve outlived everyone I ever knew, except you.”

“Don’t be morbid, lamb chop,” Joker tells him firmly, reaching across the table to lay his hand over Bruce’s. His skin is cool, a little calloused. Real. “You had a life, a good life. Then something happened, something you couldn’t control, one bad day, and you were reborn. And the only thing to do is to forget the old you. Hold onto the life you have now, hold onto this moment, because if you don’t the past will drag you under and you’ll drown. You’ve got to keep swimming darling, and you can’t look back, or you’ll never make it.”

It’s good advice, oddly so, given that it’s coming from the most unstable person Bruce knows, and he nods, and pushes away thoughts of how those young people remind him of his own children. They’d never been his, but he’d loved them like they were, and now he’s outlived all of them, all except…

He shakes his head, takes Joker’s advice and pushes away thoughts of the past. Focuses on the here and now. On Joker’s hand on his skin, his soft almost believable smile.

“What changed?” he asks, leaning into Joker’s space a little more than he’d intended to. The alcohol is starting to affect his balance. “You used to hate me. Really hate me. You’ve tried to kill me more times than I can remember, you’ve made attempts on the lives of everyone I’ve ever cared about. You killed Jason. I’ve wished you dead more times than I can count. How did we go from that to… this?”

Joker sighs, stirring his martini idly with the cocktail stick which had once held the olive. “Time, Batsy. A lot of time. Isolation. IGA.” He looks at Bruce, really looks at him, face serious for once and red eyes glittering in the low light. “I thought I was going to die, the last time they had me. I thought I was going to die alone and unknown in a dark cell, no ceremony, no audience. No one going down with me. Something like that, it puts things in perspective.

“I have tried to kill you, really tried. Not as often as you seem to think, but I’ve tried. You’re my other half, my mirror image. We’re the opposite poles of a magnet, perpetually damned to repel each other. And there have been moments when I was so angry with you for it, I wanted you dead. But now… Now, what else have I got but you? There was a time when this whole city was mine. Oh,” he added when he saw Bruce’s skeptical expression, “I didn’t run it, and I let the others have their share, but I was this city’s nightmare. Like Sopporro said, I became an archetype of fear. I could do anything. And then all that got taken away. You’re what’s left. You’re a fixed point. It’s something I’ve always liked about you, except when I hated it. Whatever happens to Gotham, you and me, we’re perpetual. I’ve… accepted that.”

“You could have rebuilt. You ran away a lot those first years I had you. You could have hidden from me if you wanted.”

Joker shrugged. “What would have been the point? I didn’t want an empire, I just wanted to know if you’d come after me.”

“I always do.”

Joker smiles, slow and intent and a little predatory. “You always do.” He downs the last mouthful of his martini and stands fluidly, holding out his hands to Bruce. “Dance with me.”

“I don’t dance,” Bruce says, finishing his own drink.

“You did once.”

“And you stabbed me,” Bruce reminds him dryly.

Joker laughs, loud and sudden, breaking the strange thick tension. “Only because you look so pretty when you bleed. But this time, I promise not to stab you. Come one, you know all I’m carrying are chopsticks. Dance with me.”

And just like in the cave all those months ago, Bruce is powerless to resist, caught in the eddies of Joker’s charisma.

He stands, and Joker takes his arm and leads him down the long curving staircase to the dance floor.

The music is all low throbbing bass, pulsing through him like adrenaline. Joker releases his arm and begins to move as soon as they step onto the dance floor, hips swaying in time with the beat, head thrown back as though in ecstasy.

Bruce moves stiffly, feeling awkward and uncomfortable in a way he never normally does. Apart from that one ill-fated waltz with Joker, it’s been decades since he last danced, and when he did it was usually formal.

Joker grins at him, like he’s done something hilarious, and catches him by the hips, hauling him in close so that they’re almost but not quite touching.

“Relax baby,” Joker says into his ear, too loud to be a whisper but still barely audible over the music. “You’re over thinking. Let go. I’ll catch you.”

Bruce laughs. “You’d let me fall just to see what kind of mess it made.”

“Sometimes,” Joker agrees, and Bruce feels the muscles of his back move as he shrugs, and when did Bruce’s hand end up on Joker’s back? “Not today. Not in this.”

He sounds so honest, so completely serious, that Bruce is almost certain that it’s a lie. But almost isn’t completely, and the alcohol and the throb of the music, and the feel of Joker’s hands on him, his cool calloused skin, are enough to force a reluctant relaxation.

His hips begin to move without conscious thought, catching the rhythm and chasing it, sending echoes down through his feet and up into his chest, so that his whole body is moving, chasing the deep euphoric pulse of the base.

Joker grins at him, wide and pleased and pure danger. There’s lust in his smile, and murder, and chaos, and Bruce is far gone enough in the magic of their enchanted evening to lean in and kiss him.

It’s not hard, or deep. By most standards it’s barely a kiss at all. A brush of Bruce’s closed lips over Joker’s smile, getting more tooth than lip. But it’s also earth shattering, the end of an era, the death of the man Bruce thought he was.

For a long moment they stand frozen, completely unmoving in the centre of a writhing mass of humanity, the house lights painting the scene in dark shadow broken by sudden vivid bursts of green and pink and pure white light.

Bruce is horrified and unsurprised all at once. They’ve been building to this for so long, a century of wanting and waiting, and he was going to break eventually. Tonight is as good a night as any other for going mad.

It’s not the kiss that breaks him in the end though, or the music, or the alcohol, or the intimate atmosphere they’ve built.

It’s the way Joker stares at him, eyes wide with genuine shock. It’s the way he whispers “darling” so softly only someone who can read the man as well as Bruce would be able to lip read it.

One night, Bruce tells himself, even though he knows that surrender will be forever. One taste won’t be enough, he’s known that from the moment he met the man. That’s one of the reasons he held off so long. This is so much more than easily satisfied lust. But still, one night. Just one night that belongs all to him. One night he can chose to share with anyone he pleases, even the most dangerous man in the world.

Joker must see the surrender in his eyes, see the moment all his carefully crafted barriers break down, because he moves like a snake, catching Bruce’s hand and hauling him close, so that they’re pressed chest to chest, one the long legs Bruce dreams about pressed too hard against his soft cock, eyes the color of fresh blood searching his own with a manic intensity.

“Dance with me,” Joker whispers, his breath tickling against Bruce’s lips, soft and smelling of gin and chili paste.

“We’ve been dancing for a hundred years,” Bruce tells him, just as softly. Joker will hear. He always does. “Maybe it’s time we did something more.”

“Oh, Batsy. The things I’m going to do to you…” Joker presses in close, rubs his thigh along the length of Bruce’s cock, makes him shudder with the sudden pleasure of it. Grabs him by the back of his neck and pulls him in close for a real kiss, tongue and teeth and chapped lips.

He kisses like he fights, impatient and inconsistent, switching from fierce to gentle as smoothly as he can go from funny to terrifying, but Bruce is used to following him, keeping up with him, overtaking him, and he takes control, guides the kiss into something deep and dirty and so much more than just a kiss because he’s him and Joker is Joker and they’re opposite poles a magnet, destined to repel each other forever. It feels like the kiss is breaking some fundamental law of the universe, and Bruce doesn’t care. He’s wanted this for too long.

When they break apart they’re both panting, and Bruce’s lips feel blood-hot and swollen.

“Home,” Joker says. “Home or I swear to God I will fuck you right here.”

Bruce’s cock twitches against Joker’s leg at the lust in the clown’s voice, and he nods, fervent and desperate. “Home. Get that stuff off your face.” They might only do this once. He wants his memories to be of Joker’s real face, not this flesh-pink facsimile.

“Flatterer,” Joker says with a smile, and pulls him into another kiss, slower and gentler than the last one.

They break apart after a moment, and stumble out of the club, clinging to each other, probably both looking a lot drunker than they really are.

They hail a taxi without too much trouble, one of the driverless yellow Lex Corp drones which have almost completely replaced human driven taxis. Bruce dislikes them on principle, both because they’re taking jobs from humans, but also because they’re heavily monitored, routes, fares and video feeds of the inside of the cab all being recorded on Lex Corp servers, an inaccessible record of where he’s been and what he’s been doing. Modern technology is making living in secret harder every year.

In the taxi, aware of the cameras watching, of the software that will be running both their faces against state and national wanted lists, Bruce pulls Joker close, kissing him long and slow, hiding them both behind a curtain of green hair.

Joker almost certainly knows what he’s doing, but he goes along with it willingly, loosening his seatbelt as far as it will go so he can lean into Bruce, one hand heavy on Bruce’s leg as he half climbs into Bruce’s lap to be able to reach him better.

The taxi drops them outside what had long ago been the Drake’s house, and is now a block of luxury flats. It’s housing for the sort of rich business people who never bother getting to know their neighbors, and so the old basement tunnel makes a far better entrance to the cave than the one behind the grandfather clock, which still stands in what was once Bruce’s drawing room and is now the pre-colonial gallery of the Gotham Museum.

Bruce pays the cab and they tumble out into what had once been Janet Drake’s rose garden and is now a car park for the tenants of the apartments.

There’s no one in the lobby, everyone who isn’t working out celebrating the end of a working week. They’re home early. It will be hours before most of the tenants stumble home.  
Joker takes Bruce’s hand as he keys in the code to open the door that will lead them home, and holds it tight all along the dank rough-cut tunnel. His grip is uncomfortably tight, like he thinks Bruce might disappear if the lets go.

The chill of the night air has sobered Bruce up, just enough that he’ll feel guilty tomorrow, but not enough to stop what he’s doing. This is his one night. It’s better he’s sober for this. He wants to remember everything.

There’s a second door at the other end of the tunnel, this one secured the best biometrics money can buy.

“Heya, BC,” Joker says, when the discreet camera turns to look at them. “You gonna let us in? We forgot our keys.”

He giggles at his own joke, and after a moment the Bat Computer says, “That would only be possible if someone were to remove your eyeballs and fingertips. Please stop blinking while I scan you.”

It’s a shock, the way the voice always is, but it’s one he’s getting used to. The Bat Computer still primarily communicates with him through text, but there are moment when that isn’t possible, and the sound of her voice in his ear, everything and nothing like Oracle, is slowing becoming familiar. And he hears her speak to Joker, their low murmurs and Joker’s sudden bursts of laughter a comforting background to his work.

Joker holds himself eerily still, even his breathing so shallow as to be almost undetectable, until the door slides silently open, then he relaxes, leaning into Bruce in a casually affectionate gesture that makes Bruce’s heart ache.

Long fingers reach out and trail over the wall beside them, tracing the lines of one of the carved faces, following the shape of eyes Bruce had last seen wide with terror, the mouth that had screamed in his nightmares for weeks afterwards.

That was back when he still had nightmares. When he could still remember all his failures. Before he lived so long they all began to blur into one. Before he’d started keeping this visual record of his successes and failures, the people he saved and the ones he didn’t. Back when his memory was still stored in his head rather than on walls and RAM.

“Now now, none of that,” Joker says softly, catches his chin and turning his head so that he’s forced to look at the clown. “I want you here with me Batsy, not off in past somewhere I can’t follow.”

Bruce can’t help smiling, just a little, at Joker’s solemn tone. “I’m not going anywhere Joker.”

“You’d better not,” Joker says fiercely, using his grip on Bruce’s chin to pull him into a quick kiss. “I’m going to slip into something a little more… conspicuous. Why don’t you make yourself comfortable?”

Bruce nods, and Joker slips away to the screened off corner where their clothes are kept.

Making himself comfortable isn’t actually an easy thing in the cave, which was designed for practicality above all else. There are only two comfortable chairs, his own desk chair and the old leather armchair which used to live in the medbay, and which Joker quickly claimed as his own after Bruce captured him the first time.

Bruce’s bed is a narrow cot, designed to be comfortable for sleeping on, but not designed for two.

Joker’s bed isn’t even a bed. It’s an old mattress, rescued from the manor when the furniture and fittings had been stripped out to turn it into a museum, covered in a great nest of blanket and rugs and Bruce’s old clothes. It’s very comfortable, if a little smelly, but it’s also Joker’s. His one little bit of territory inside the cave, and using it without Joker’s permission could all too easily be interpreted as an act of aggression.

Bruce removes his jacket and undoes his tie, leaving it to hang loosely from his collar. He undoes the top two buttons of his shirt and then, remembering the way Joker’s eyes linger on his arms when he’s working out, takes out his cufflinks and rolls his sleeves up to the elbow.

He hovers for a minute, unsure what to do, before lowering himself into his computer chair. It’s familiar, and comfortable, and importantly, big enough for two. Bruce has daydreamed more than once while he was supposed to be working about pulling Joker down to curl up in his lap, so Bruce could stroke his hair while he worked. It’s an old well worn fantasy, but not one he’s let himself consider often. He brings it out now while he waits, turns it over in his mind, considers all the different ways it could go that he’s never allowed himself to imagine before, imagines Joker pliant and affectionate, or submissive and needy, or vicious and demanding.

“You’d better have been thinking about me, darling Bat, because if anyone else made you look like that I’m going to have to kill them.”

Bruce should probably say something about the casual threat of murder, but any words die in his throat when he looks up at Joker.

He’s stripped away his carefully applied flesh-tone make-up, his face bare and unadorned except for the scarlet lipstick which is as much a part of his as his green hair, and Bruce’s whole being aches with longing.

“Better,” he says, gruff with lust and awkward affection. “Now you look like yourself.”

Joker smiles at him, the classic terrifying Joker smile, the one Bruce pretends he doesn’t love, and begins to unbutton his shirt.

Bruce watches, hypnotized like a rabbit before a weasel, as long clever fingers strip away shirt and tie, and move onto pants. Joker slides his suit pants down over narrow hips, stepping out of them to reveal lime green lace panties completely failing to restrain his hard cock.

Bruce licks his lips, aware that it looks like a seduction even though it hadn’t been meant as one, and holds out his hands to the clown.

Joker’s smile softens a little as he takes the proffered hands and folds himself into Bruce’s lap, long legs thrown over the arm of the chair, his weight resting on Bruce’s supporting arm. There’s a moment of complete stillness, both of them adjusting to this new level of intimacy, feeling out the boundaries of what they’re about to do, and then Bruce can’t wait any long, runs a proprietary hand over Joker’s hip and up long long legs.

Joker is even longer and leaner undressed, all sharp angles and whipcord muscles, like an anatomy model someone forgot to color in. His skin is soft in the few patches Bruce’s exploring fingers find which aren’t scarred, the fine green hairs on his legs and trailing down from his belly button making him look even less human than usual.

He’s not handsome like this, stripped down to his raw self, too skinny and scarred and weird looking, but he’s everything Bruce wants and he can’t remember ever being more attracted to anyone in his life. He runs a hand over Joker’s knee, feels the uneven texture of too-often broken cartilage under his hand.

Slowly, gently, he lets his hand follow the trail of scars back up, tracing the shape of the bigger ones, feeling the give in the ones which cover missing flesh, the smooth texture of the burns, the twisty ropey reminders of knife fights, until his hand is resting on the edge of the bat burned over Joker’s sternum, its head resting between his pecs, the tops of the wings stopping just short of his nipples.

“Touch it,” Joker says urgently, “C’mon Batsy, touch it, touch it, touch it…”

Bruce runs his fingers over the raised pink skin, so much warmer than the rest of Joker’s skin, like the hot metal that had made it had only just been pulled away.

Joker groans, low and heartfelt, more like Bruce had touched his cock than stroked a decade old scar. “Fuck, Bruce, harder, make it hurt.”

Bruce twists his hand so he can press short-trimmed nails into the skin, drag them down hard and sharp over the tender skin, and Joker shouts, back arching, pressing up into the pain, whole body tense. “Fuuuuuuuck. God, I’ve dreamt about you doing that for so long.”

Bruce gentles his touch, but keeps scratching at the scar, nails gentle enough to be a tease. “Why didn’t you ever let it heal?”

Joker tips his head to one side and observes Bruce through long pale lashes. He might have been blonde once, before he was himself, or maybe they’d been bleached by the acid. “Some things don’t heal, however long you leave them,” he says, and Bruce knows he’s talking about more than scars.

“I like it,” Bruce says, voice quiet. This is one of his darkest secrets, one he’s never told anyone else. Never would tell anyone else. “I like you having my mark on you.”

Joker grins, so wide Bruce worries even his elastic skin will tear. “I know. And I know you’ve been fantasizing about getting me in this position for years. So now you’ve got me, what’re you going to do with me, huh?”

Bruce has no idea, has never let himself get that far even in his wildest dream, so he kisses Joker to cover his confusion, long and deep.

For a long moment, Joker lies passive, letting Bruce do what he wants with barely a response. Bruce pushes harder, bites at his bottom lip, gently at first, and then when that doesn’t get anything more than a slight sigh in response, hard enough that he tastes blood.

Joker pulls away, stares at Bruce with wide eyes. Bruce wonders what he must look like, still fully dressed with lipstick and blood smeared across his mouth. Joker looks obscene, his mouth pulp with kisses and so red, a thin trickle of blood leaking from his split lip, and his lipstick smudged and a little faded.

“Oh, Brucey…” Joker whispers, and then he’s launching himself at Bruce, twisting himself around so that he straddling Bruce, one leg still caught on the arm of the chair, bent at the sort of strange angle which would be agonizing for anyone else but seems totally natural to Joker, red mouth finding Bruce’s, biting and licking, too wet and violent to be properly called a kiss.

Bruce’s whole body shudders with shocked lust at the feel of Joker’s blood slick lips sliding against his, the feeling of sharp nails digging into the back of his neck, and he kisses back with all he’s got, allowing himself to get lost in the taste and smell and feel of Joker, here, real and relatively safe, under his hands.

He grips slender hips tight enough to bruise and groans at the feel of lace, soft and a little scratchy under his fingers.

“You like the underwear Batsy?” Joker asks, pulling back a scant inch to press his words into Bruce’s lips. “Always knew you’d be kinky.”

“Only for you,” Bruce tells him, which is only half a lie, and worth it for the way Joker’s hips jerk when he says it.

“Fuck, you can’t say things like that and not touch me Bruce, that’s just cruel,” Joker says, shifting so that his knees slot into the chair alongside Bruce’s legs, bringing them close enough for Joker to grind down on his leg. “Ah, god, that feels so good. Fuck, Bruce touch me, please, fuck, touch me!”

Bruce does as he’s told cupping Joker’s lace clad cock in one hand, squeezing his balls gently just so he can watch Joker’s face as he does it, the agony of sheer pleasure playing out on his expressive features.

“Love you hands,” Joker tells him, catching the one that’s tangled in his hair and bringing it too his mouth, pressing quick kisses to Bruce’s scarred knuckles. “The dreams I’ve had about these hands…” He licks a line from wrist to the tip of Bruce’s middle finger, then slides his mouth down slowly over middle and index finger, moaning low and breathless as he does.

Bruce can’t breathe, can’t think. For decades he’s denied himself ever fantasies, and now here’s the real thing, warm and pliant in his arms, and his cock is so hard it hurts, adrenaline and arousal making his thoughts slow and stupid, everything that isn’t Joker’s skin, and Joker’s laughing eyes, and his red red mouth melting out of his brain like sand from a broken hourglass.

“God, your mouth,” he says reverently. He wants to touch, wants to stroke cheeks hollowed with suction, trace pouting lips, but Joker is hot and hard and so wet in his hand and he doesn’t know how to process that information except to keep up gentle pressure, keep Joker making those soft involuntary whimpers that are the hottest thing Bruce has ever heard. “Fuck, I want your mouth on me.”

Joker pulls off his fingers with an obscene pop and grins at him, mouth so swollen and so red it’s almost the same color as his eyes, and Bruce knows he’s going to be dreaming of that sight for the rest of his life. “You only have to ask, dear one. Anything you want from me, you can have.”

He slides out of Bruce’s lap, liquid as a jungle cat, to kneel between Bruce’s spread legs. Bruce has to fight back a protest at the loss of his warm weight, but the sight of him on his knees before him is worth it.

“Just one thing before we start,” Joker says, voice heavy with lust and wicked intent, and he pulls open a drawer on Bruce’s desk and produces a tube of lipstick. “I want to look my best for this. Who knows how long it’ll be before you unbend enough for us to have this again, and I want your memories to be good ones.”

He applies a slick of blood-red lipstick, a little uneven but bright and vivid as a ruby, and smacks his lips together to even out the color. When he smiles, wide and wicked and so fond Bruce almost can’t bear it, he looks everything and nothing like the man from Bruce’s youth. Softer, and gentler, and older, and steeped in so much more blood it’s a wonder it hasn’t stained his porcelain skin permanently.

Bruce stares, feeling almost drugged, as quick clever fingers undo his fly, wrap cool and firm and sosogood around his cock, pulling him of his Tux trouser into the cool air of the cave.

“Always knew you’d have a pretty cock,” Joker says smugly, giving him a perfunctory stroke that makes Bruce jack-knife at the sudden unexpected pleasure. “I’m going to suck you now, and you’re going to pull my hair hard enough that I may end up bald and come down my throat, understand?”

Bruce can only nod, struck dumb with shocked lust.

Joker nods in return, looking pleased and smug, and ducks his head to lick a burning stripe up the underside of Bruce’s cock. He scrapes gentle teeth over he sensitive head, making Bruce gasp, and then sinks down, taking all of him so smoothly Bruce wonders if even has a gag reflex.

Joker’s mouth is every bit as good as Bruce had never let himself imagine. He sucks him quick and sloppy, not technically the best oral sex Bruce has ever revived by a long shot, but undeniably the most pleasurable, because it’s Joker doing it, his dark reflection, the one constant in the turmoil of a world he was never meant to live to see. The person he trusts above all other and doesn’t trust as all. His other half.

He has a moment of dazed inaction, frozen in place by unfamiliar pleasure and uncertain emotions, but eventually he remembers Joker’s instructions, gets both hands tangled tightly in his clown’s wild mane of green hair, winding long strands around his fingers and pulling.

He’s rewarded with a deep moan, the vibrations jolting along his cock and straight to the core of him, making him moan in turn, hips shifting desperately.

After that it’s a mind-blowing feedback loop of pleasure, Joker’s moans and whimpers making Bruce’s hips thrust and his fingers tighten, which in turn make Joker moan and Bruce can’t think, can barely breathe, everything except Joker fading out of awareness, until they’re the only people in the world, just them, Joker’s wicked tongue and warm wet mouth and the jolts of pleasure that are shooting like electric shocks up and down Bruce’s spine.

His eyes keep trying to close, but he forces them open, not wanting to miss a moment of this, of Joker’s red mouth stretched wide around Bruce’s cock, his throat fluttering as he instinctively tries to breath, one long hand gripping painfully as Bruce’s thigh, the other moving fast and hard on his own cock, glistening with pre-cum, and Bruce would feel slighted that he doesn’t get to touch except that there’s no way they’re not doing this again tonight, especially when Bruce is already there, poised on the edge of orgasm, as fast as a teenager.

“Fuck Joker,” he gasps out, tightening his grip on Joker’s hair until it’s cutting off the blood to his fingertips, “Fuck, please, god, so close.”

Joker knows what he needs, understands him better than he understands himself, and long clever fingers worm their way under the hem of his shirt to press sharp sharp nails against the small neat scar on his side, the one Joker left the last time they danced, and that’s it, that’s enough, he’s coming harder than he’s ever come in his life, everything disappearing into blackness and the roaring of blood in his ears and the terrifying overwhelming pleasure.

It’s so good, and it’s been so long, it takes him a moment to groggily realise that he isn’t swimming back to consciousness like he should be, but sinking further and further into warm darkness.

“Joker, he croaks out, just aware enough to know the clown must be there still, to feel his warms pressed close to Bruce. “Joker, what….”

“The lipstick darling. A little trick I learnt from Ivy. I’ve been waiting sixty years to use it. Now you just have a nice little nap, and when you wake up, we’ll finish this beautiful evening with a bang, What do you say?”

But Bruce can’t say anything, because he’s already unconscious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I honestly wasn't sure we'd ever get to this point! I've spent so long getting them here.
> 
> Please please comment. This is actually my first time writing Batjokes smut, and it's a big change for the series, so I'm really nervous about it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: bloodplay, slightly dubious consent, mistreatment of AIs, Bruce and Joker generally being weird and obsessive and a bit creepy. Also theres some sex crying.

“JOKER!”

BC’s voice seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, Batsy’s carved friends catching the sound and sending it ricocheting off in unexpected directions. It disturbs the cave’s Bats, who erupt from their roost in a squealing explosion of small black bodies.

“Hey cutie,” Joker sing-songs, looking up at where he estimates her nearest camera to be. “You enjoying your evening?”

“What have you done to him?!”

“Oh, Brucie’s just having a little nap. Looks like I wore him out. Not exactly surprising, it’s been a while for him.”

“You betrayed him.” The voice, synthesized though it might be, sounds upset, disappointed. Joker almost feels bad about that. BC’s only just learning to make friends at all; to be betrayed by him so soon after they got to know each other will probably put her development back by years. But still, only almost guilty. He doesn’t do guilt, that’s what Batsy’s for.

“Lemme guess,” he says, crouching down and rummaging through the pile of discarded clothes by Bruce’s feet, “you’re going to foil my nefarious schemes?”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Joker,” she says. “I thought you were my friend.”

Ouch. Little lady’s apparently been learning emotional manipulation as well as a sense of humor from him. Shame she tried it on entirely the wrong person first.

“See, that’s where you went wrong honey-pie,” he tells her, his fingers closing over his prize, his body weight shifting so that he’s balanced ready for his next move. “Doesn’t matter how much you like ‘em, never ever trust a villain.” And he strikes.

It had taken him nearly seven months, but he’d found the weak spot in the Bat-Cave’s formidable AI, a way into the power circuits that keep her fed. All you need is a small opening in the floor, easily hidden from her almost all-seeing eyes by his favorite armchair, and some small piece of non-conductive material. Something like the end of a chopstick.

It won’t hold for long, even the modern super-efficient power coils are hot enough to burn through bamboo, but it will take time, a couple of hours, and that’s all he needs.

He pats the nearest available bit of hardware. “I’m not going to break him,” he says, aware the emergency back-up systems will be recording everything that happens for Bruce to review later. “I just wanna… play with him a bit. Promise.” He giggles at his own absurdity. “And you’ll be back to normal in no time. Plenty of recent backups, I made sure of that. Just cos I hurt you, doesn’t mean I don’t like you.”

Harley had never really got the hang of that. He doesn’t hurt people because he hates them (except when he does) or because he likes them (except when he doesn’t). He hurt people because he is, fundamentally, a monster. Even Batsy has trouble with that, despite all the proof Joker’s given him over the years. Always, people want to see the humanity in him, because their tiny brains can’t accept that anything quite as wicked as him could really exist.

He grins to himself, amused like he always is by that fundamental joke of the universe, and sets to work hauling Batsy over to the med-bay.

He’d done this once before, long ago. Something like thirty years ago, at his best estimation. The medbay is cleverer now than it once was, and the comfy armchair has been moved over to the bank of screens, but Bruce is just as heavy as he remembers, six foot two of solid muscle.

It takes a couple of tries, but he manages to get Brucey up onto the table and arrange him in roughly the position he wants.

The restraints built into the table are strong, as he knows from long experience. Probably Batsy could break them, with time and concentration, but Joker isn’t intending to give him either of those.

It takes a long time to get all the straps in place. Maybe too long. By the last ones he's working too fast, fingers clumsy with the urgency of trying to get it done before Bruce wakes up.

The lipstick must have been more powerful than he'd thought though, because Batsy is only just stirring when Joker gets back from cracking the safe, carrying the beautiful rosewood presentation box containing Bruce's razor. It's an old, and probably very expensive, straight razor (though Joker has always preferred the English name. A cut throat.) It's probably an heirloom. That would explain why he kept it, even with Joker living in the cave. 

Actually it had been locked away, and with B.C. online, he never would have gotten to it. But with her (it?) out of the way, it was just a matter of breaking the lock, and he had all these lovely chemicals to play with, peroxide and hydrochloric acid and all sorts of lovely things. Bruce's safe hadn't stood a chance. (He'd been looking for the razor, but since he'd gone to the trouble of opening it, he'd taken a few other little toys. Keepsakes really, to remind him of his time in the cave). 

"J'er," Brucey slurs, struggling a little, clearly still not quite awake. 

"Hello beautiful," Joker purrs, licking his lips at the sight of him. "Don't you just look a picture." 

"Wha're y'doin'?" Bruce asks. 

Joker feels the grin split his face, stretching his mouth wide enough to be uncomfortable, even for him. "Why darling, what do you think? Anything I want, of course!" 

Batsy gives a kind of whole body shudder that could be lust or revulsion or maybe both. "Ba'pu'er won' le' y'ge away w'thisss," he mutters, the muscle relaxant still in his system turning the last word into a low hiss. 

"BC won't be joining us this evening," Joker tells him. "I wanted us to be alone, so she's taking a little nap."

“If you hurt her…” Batman spits out, his words becoming clearer as he regains consciousness.

“Oh don’t be ridiculous,” Joker says. “She’s a computer remember? You hurt her, she just reboots to her last save file. She’ll be fine in a couple of hours.”

“What about me?” Batsy asks. “Am I going to be fine?” He’s spotted the razor in Joker’s hands, eyes tracking it like a rabbit watching the weasel.

“I don’t know,” Joker muses. His face breaks into a grin. “Let’s find out shall we?”

The first cut goes through fabric rather than skin, the blade pressed flat against Bruce’s heaving chest, sliding between layers of fabric and slicing away buttons. Pop pop pop. 

He peels back layers to reveal the skin beneath, pale from too long locked away from the sun, but with that hint of color that suggests he’d tan instantly given the chance.

He’s scarred and muscular, but he looks vulnerable all laid out like this for Joker’s eyes.

His nipples are a dusky pink, hardening under Joker’s delighted gaze. He can’t resist pressing the flat of the razor to then, watching Bruce jerk in his bonds at the feeling of the cool metal. Sensitive, Joker notes with pleasure.

He’s got no time to be distracted though, not when Bruce is still wearing trousers and he’s got places to be.

He allows himself the luxury of taking his time with Bruce’s trousers, watching with undisguised fascination the warring emotions he can see in his Bat’s face, anger and fear and still that deep affection that Joker doesn’t quite know what to do with.

He’s careful careful not to leave scratches, even though he thinks Brucie would enjoy them, wants to build up the anticipation, the fear, until Bruce will be as desperate as him to see blood, if only to stop the waiting.

He tugs away the shredding remains of Bruce’s dress pants to reveal black cotton boxers, tented by Batsy’s arousal, a darker spot where precome has soaked into the fabric, and his grin grows even wider, because he’d known his darling would enjoy things getting a little rough, but he hadn’t expect this much of a reaction to a teensy bit of mild knife play like that.

"You don't have to do this," Bruce says, his voice low and urgent, and Joker laughs at the idea that he could ever not want this, the idea that he might ever look at Batman aching for Joker to abuse him and not _want_.

"I think you must have me confused with someone else," he tells his Bat, running a hand up Bruce's bare leg just to watch the way it made him twitch in his restraints. "I very much want to do this. In fact, I'd say I want it nearly as much as you do."

Bruce growls, a sub vocal noise of pure frustration. He doesn't like not getting his way. "I don't want any of this, Joker, and if you think..." 

Batsy is being boring, so Joker turns his attention back to his captive's boxers, sliding the flat of the blade into the fly and pressing down, cold steel against blood-hot skin.

Bruce's denials cut off with a sudden gasp, his hips thrusting up into the pressure, and it's only Joker's quick reactions that saves the night from ending in far more blood than either of them would enjoy right now.

"Careful darling," he says with a treacle sweet smile. "Anyone would think you were enjoying yourself!"

Batsy twitches and Joker knows it’s half instinctive denial and half desperate arousal and either one is a win with Bruce, but both at once feels like a birthday present every time.

Denial is winning though, he can see it Batsy’s face, can track the ebb and flow of the argument he’s having with himself through the minute flickers of his expression. He wants to give in what he’s feeling, give in Joker, but he thinks he’s not allowed.

He strokes Batman’s hip softly, and then squeezes hard enough to get his attention. “You don’t have to fight this. You don’t have fight _me_. I promised you darling, I’ll catch you.”

“Not exactly reassuring when you were the one to push me,” Bruce mutters, but he wants to be convinced, Joker can see it in his eyes.

“That’s what I do. It’s what I’m _for_. You wouldn’t love me if I was anything else.”

That’s a low blow, and he’s not sure if he’s hurting Bruce or himself more with it. If Bruce denies him, pushes him away… But if he gives in…

Tonight is breaking both of them in subtle ways, and it’s up to Joker to make sure they get put back together again. Which is patently absurd, he doesn’t fix things, he breaks and break and breaks them until… Until blond hair, all matted up with blood, just visible as they zip up the body bag. Until playing cards thrown into a grave instead of roses. Until Joker taking out three hospitals without giving Batsy a chance to stop him because he doesn’t know how to handle the things he’s feeling.

Bruce studies his face, and Joker lets it all show, all the things the flicker like shadows in the corners of his mind, all the thoughts he never lets himself have because he doesn’t feel things like that, all the laughter and hope and pain and hate and rage and lust and rage and rage and rage. Lets it all out to play in his eyes and his expression, lets Batsy see all that he is, human and monster alike. Lets him study him with eyes that look too soft to be that intense.

And then suddenly Batsy closes his eyes, slumps back, and Joker prepares for the beginning of the end, but Bruce says softly, “At least try not to cut off anything you can’t sew back on,” and Joker realises Bruce is still hard, that he still wants him, even after seeing all things he knows he’d just seen.

It’s… unbelievable and ridiculous and the worst idea either of them have ever had, and Joker doesn’t even try to hold back the laughter, wild and free, so hard that he has to brace himself on Batman’s hip to keep from falling, and still it comes is great peals, joyful and real and hearty and full of as much affection as he’s capable of, because this is Batman, _his_ Batman, and the man is completely insane and he _loves the Joker_. He thinks he’s unrepentant and incurable and hopeless and all the things he _is_ and he _still loves him_. It's the best punch line Joker’s ever heard, to the best joke ever lived, and it’s glorious.

He wants to make Bruce feel good, wants to make him come again and again until the pleasure turns into pain, wants to force his beautiful body to feel so intensely that maybe he’ll have an idea of what Joker is feeling right now. And that’s… doable. He has a blade, and Bruce’s hard cock (he can still taste him, his mouth is still full of the flavour of his semen and he wants to suck him again, doesn’t think he’ll ever get bored of it). He has a blade _right next to_ Bruce’s cock, just sitting right there. He’d honestly forgotten than for a moment, and he’s astonished he didn’t slip and cut anything while he was laughing, but rediscovering it is the best kind of surprise.

He takes a slow measured breath, calming himself enough that his hands are steady, and presses the blunt edge of the blade against Batsy’s cock, dragging it up to rub over the head, cool and smooth and delicious, watches Bruce’s expression go heavy with want even as the affection still burns in his eyes. He looks beautiful and edible and Joker wants to make him come so hard he passes out.

“Oh my beautiful darling,” he whispers, flicking his wrist so the blade slices away the button from Batman’s fly, sending skittering away across the floor and smirking at the instinctual hip thrust he gets in response. “I am going to make you bleed, and you’re going to beg me for it.”

Batsy’s eyes light up with something like a challenge. “Yeah?” he asks, voice soft and low and intent. “Make me.”

Perfect, he’s perfect and Joker wants to keep him like this forever, as soft and vulnerable under his hard shell as he remembers him being all those years ago, the first time he got to see him like this. Defiant and desperate and completely fixated on Joker, like no one else even exists. It makes the urges to cut him stronger, layering over the sight of so much soft smooth skin just begging to be cut and bitten and bruised that he doesn’t know where to start.

But no, that’s not true, he knows just where to start, has been planning this in the back of his mind for nearly eighty years.

He tries to restrain himself, keep the press of his blade gentle as he drags it down the centre of Batman’s chest, but it’s hard, too hard, and he can’t resist pressing a little over the breastbone, watching the blood well up and pool in the groove between Bruce’s pecs, trickling down over his neck. For a long moment he’s frozen, hypnotized by the sight of it, then the need to taste overwhelms even his need to watch, and he ducks his head to lap at the sluggishly bleeding wound, moaning at the taste, copper and smog and justice and Batsy.

Batsy groans, and laughs softly. It’s nice to know all his fantasies about cutting Batsy up had been accurate.

Batman’s eyes are closed, his head tipped back, baring his throat, a gesture of submission that make’s Joker’s whole body flash hot-cold with desire. He needs to be close, needs to taste and touch.

He swings himself up into Bruce’s lap, straddling him, Bruce’s hard cock pressing up against his ass.

The want hits him like a sledgehammer to the temple (although he mostly only remembers the aftermath of that particular row with Harley, rather than the violence itself). He doesn’t usually want, not like other people seem to, has never had his head turned by a pretty face, male or female or anything else, but now his body is moving without permission or control, grinding back into Batman’s cock, teasing them both as it slides rough and slightly sticky against him.

“Oh Bruce.” He lets his head fall back, lets his thigh muscles tense, lets his whole body do exactly what it wants. “You are putting that inside me tonight.”

Batman makes this shocked shuddering noise of pure want, and Joker realizes suddenly that his own cock is hard and leaking and kinda begging to be touched. He’d mostly forgotten about it until this moment. He rubs a hand against himself, gasping for the intensity of the sensation, and then slides it down to tug painfully on his balls, a reminder to himself to be patient. Everything in its due time.

“Tell me you got lube down here,” he says, “because I’ll take it dry if I have too, but that’s not gonna be a pleasant experience for either of us.”

He’d do it anyway though, just because he wants it that bad. He can imagine the pain, and the blood, can imagine Bruce trying to go soft inside him as horror replaced arousal but the tight clench of Joker’s body holding him in place. He’s… going to file that thought away for later, because delicious as it is the real thing is going to be so much better.

“Desk. Second drawer. It’s labeled Kevlar cleaner.”

Joker snorts. “Armor polish. You actually call your lube armor polish. That’s… actually totally unsurprising.”

Letting go of Bruce, climbing off him, is almost unbearable, but he forces himself to do it. Bruce is all tied up, he can’t go anywhere until Joker wants him too. He can’t run away from this, and that’s a heady thought.

He finds the lube quickly, grinning in triumph at the small tube. “You often jerk it at the desk?” he asks.

“Occasionally.”

“And I’ve never seen this why?”

“I wait till you’re asleep. It’s… sometimes I watch you, while I do it.”

Joker closes his eyes for a moment, forces his hands not to shake. He had so much more of Batman’s attention than he ever realized and it’s a wonderful thought. “You ever fuck yourself here?”

Batman blushing is a truly glorious sight. “Not there.”

Oooooh. “So you do enjoy that sort of thing…” That’s an idea when all sorts of possibilities, but not for right now. “Another time darling. _Next_ time. For now, I want you in me far too much to change my plans.”

Bruce quirks something like a smirk, dark and thick like treacle. “Big words. You haven’t actually done anything to me yet except tie me up.”

“Oh ho, that was a challenge if ever I heard one!” Joker pushes himself up onto his long legs, staggering as the force of his lust makes his knees weak. “You are just… delicious.”

He sets the lube on the edge of the table, beside the razor, and uses Bruce’s shoulders as leverage to swing himself back up onto the table, straddling Bruce’s legs, their cocks so close they’re almost brushing.

“I’ve been planning this for years,” he tells his Batman, looking down into those blue blue eyes. He can’t look away, doesn’t want to look away, even as he snaps open the cap on the tube, squirts a little onto his fingers. “I’ve lain awake in bed so many nights, waiting for you to get back, plotting out all the things I was going to do to you once the time was right.”

He doesn’t bother with any kind of gentleness or tease, he knows everything his body can take (which is anything he needs it too), so he shoves straight in, just one long finger to start.

It’s a strange sensation, one he’s only experienced very rarely and which hasn’t got any less novel over time. Fullness, an awareness of a part of his body that he’s usually perfectly happy to forget about. A rough demanding sensation that will not be ignored.

“Ahhh, that’s… You’re looking a little glazed there, darling. Are you paying attention?”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever paid closer attention to anything in my life,” Batsy says, in that dry way of his.

“Well good. I’d hate for you not to be getting the full benefit of this. I don’t, ah, do this for just anyone, you know.”

“Oh god, Joker,” Bruce says, low and reverent. “I shouldn’t want you this much. I shouldn’t want anything or anyone this much, it’s not right, craving, obsession like this, it can’t be right.”

“It’s entirely wrong, and completely perfect darling.” He pulls out his finger, pushes back in with two and gasps for the sudden increase in sensation, neither good nor bad except for the way it’s making Batman look at him like he’s temptation made flesh. “We’re perfect, we’ve always been perfect, in the dark twisted way people try not to think about. We rip and tear and hurt one another but it’s all just an attempt to be close, to touch one another in ways we’d never touch anyone else.”

Bruce twitches. “No one…?” he asks, desperate and a little shy, and Joker laughs because that hadn’t been what he meant at all.

“I didn’t actually mean that no one else had ever, uh, fucked me in the ass, to put it delicately. You will in fact be the third person to have that pleasure, after myself and Eddie.”

“You fucked the _Riddler_?!”

Joker chuckles and scissors his fingers, making sure everything he’s feeling is showing clear on his features for Bruce to see. “That was Harley’s reaction as well. I was curious. It wasn’t something I remembered ever doing before, and for all his front, Eddie was always a little bit fascinated with me. Almost completely asexual as well of course, but always willing to try new things in the pursuit of knowledge.”

“And was it… good?”

Bruce sounds equal parts fascinated and horrified, but evidently the sight of Joker fucking himself is appealing enough to override that, because his cock is still standing to attention, wet with precome Joker wants to lick.

“More interesting than good,” Joker admits, considering the memories. “Not unpleasant though, and for a while afterwards I had to the most _delicious_ dreams about you, darling.”

That earns him a twitch of that lovely blood-dark cock, and he’s probably not ready, but he doesn’t want to wait anymore. Patience is only one of his virtues some of the time, and this isn’t one of those times.

“Since I know it’s been at least four decades for you, and you only ever had one unplanned sprog anyway, I’m going to assume you’re not going to give me anything that itches,” Joker says, grabbing hold of Batman’s cock.

It’s hot and hard and velvet smooth in his hand, and he didn’t know he even could want like this, with his whole body. So many years and still so much he doesn’t know. It makes him hopeful that the next eighty years will be as entertaining as the last. The prologue is done, the first act come and gone and this night is the finale of act two, but that’s okay because there’s so much more to come and he just knows it’s going to be _glorious_.

Right now though he can’t quite imagine anything as good as Bruce’s cock. He sinks down slowly, slowly, all that delicious precome easing the way, but it still feels like he’s being split in half, torn open and down and up, forced to reshape himself to accommodate the Batman just like he’s been doing since he was born in acid and fire.

“Ooooooooooh, _Bruce_.”

“Joker!” And he’s never heard Batsy sound like this, not anything like this, not even in the sex tapes he knows off by heart. Part of him is certain Bruce has never sounded like this for anyone else, and the rest of wants to kill all the other people in the world who might ever have heard it.

He has to shift around to get fully seated, rising up before he sinks a little further down, taking more of Batman inside himself each time, and he hadn’t expect this either, hadn’t expect that this would make him want to fuck, to give up on his lovely fantasy and just ride Bruce hard and fast until they both come.

He can resist. He can be patient when the rewards are good enough and this… but first needs a little taste, something to satisfy his body that it will be getting what it wants.

He rises up, careful not to unseat himself, and shoves back down hard enough that the noise he makes is more pain than pleasure, except for all the ways it’s pure undiluted bliss. Bruce grunts out a desperate noise that makes Joker want to _choke_ him and thrusts up as much as he can while tied down so effectively.

It takes a few shifts in position to find the exact angle that sends Bruce’s cock sliding over Joker’s sweet spot, but once he does he has to bite his lip to keep from screaming with the sheer blinding sensation of it all.

He doesn’t know how he could have thought this would be just a taste, how he thought he could give this up, can’t imagine anymore what he was thinking. And then his darling growls out “don’t stop” in a voice that’s halfway between Batman and Brucie, and Joker remembers exactly what he’s doing here.

He can’t stay in the cave forever, appealing at the idea might seem at times, and he _has_ to leave Bruce with a reminder, because memory is a fickle thing when your job is being hit over the head by supervillains.

He drops down, positioning himself so that he can just barely feel Bruce’s cock against his sweet spot, a constant gentle tease, and picks up the razor.

Batsy actually whimpers, tries to move, but he can’t get enough leverage with Joker’s weight on him even light as he is, and growls in frustration when he realizes how helpless he really is.

Joker pats his cheek with a hand sticky with half dried lube. “I know darling. I don’t like it either but I’ve got _plans_ and I’m not going to let either of our cocks mess it up.”

Bruce’s eyes flick between the razor and Joker’s face, trying to work out where this is going.

“I wear your marks everywhere I go darling. It seems only fair you do the same.”

And that noise was a moan, bitten off sharply before it had time to form, and that’s all the motivation Joker needs to slide the razor’s blade out and lean forward to get a better angle. Really, this would work better if he were straddling Bruce’s waist, but that would mean not getting to feel it when his cock kicks inside Joker’s body, and that’s unacceptable.

He’s spent hours considering just what marks he wants to leave – he’s never before regretted making his calling card quite such a complex image – but in the end he has one signature that will always be recognizably his, even if he does have to share it with the Creeper.

He makes the first cut just under Bruce’s right nipple, matching the top of his own bat. Bruce grits his teeth against the pain, hisses out a breath, but he’s still distractingly hard inside Joker, so he guesses it’s surprised more than an objection.

He makes the second vertical almost but not quite parallel to the first, and tries not to be disappointed when he doesn’t get him a reaction. The horizontal, catching and tugging at the two existing lines where it crosses them, earns him a hissed breath, a clenching and unclenching of those perfectly sculpted stomach muscles.

He’s got the feel for it now, for how he’s going to react (precome is beading at the tip of his cock and his mouth is watering but his hands are steady), how _Bruce_ is going to react, and so the second set of cuts are faster, less careful. He gets a gasp and something that’s the bastard child of a moan and a whimper, cut off before it has a chance to fully form.

Bruce arches his back for the horizontal this time, making a thin stream of blood trickle down over his nipple and Joker is working to a deadline here but there are some things he’ll never be able to resist, and licking blood from Bruce’s nipples is one of them.

He has to kneel up, slide nearly all the way off Batman's cock and arch his back oddly to reach, but it’s worth is when he gets a moan, not bitten off or disguised this time, real and desperate and open.

Bruce tastes as good as he always has, rich and coppery and infinitely moreish, and Joker can’t stop himself following the trail of blood back up to the cuts themselves, to nuzzle and lip at the sluggishly bleeding wounds, shoving his tongue in, inside Bruce’s flesh where everything is slick and soft and so _good_ it almost hurts.

He’s distantly aware that he’s trembling faintly, but that’s unimportant when he’s got Batman’s blood _inside him_ , when he’s exactly where he’s wanted to be for eighty years. His nose aches and his eyes are stinging and it takes him a long long moment to realize that he’s _crying_ , for the first time since he crawled from the acid, maybe for the first time _ever_ , the sheer depth and strength of his emotion forcing its way out the only way it can.

Batsy chokes out his name and Joker tears himself away to look into his eyes, to watch Bruce soften with something that can only be love.

“I wish I could touch you,” Bruce says gently, and Joker’s fingers twitch towards the restraints before he can stop himself, but no, he has _plans_ , he has things he needs to do. He needs to finish up the beautiful mess he’s making of Batsy’s lovely pecs, and then he needs to make them both come so hard they black out a little. The overture to act three is already starting to swell in the back of his mind and time is running out.

“Eighty two years, six months and nine days darling,” Joker tells him. “Indulge me?”

Bruce’s breath hitched. “Seventy five years, three months,” he says in reply, and relaxes back into his bonds.

Joker chuckles, low and happier than he can remember being maybe ever. “I’ve heard of long engagements sweetheart, but this is just ridiculous.”

“Well if you’d hurry up, maybe we could finally consummate this relationship, huh?” Bruce asks with a smirk, shifting his hips in a way that makes Joker gasp and seriously consider untying Batsy so he can pound him like he so clearly wants to. But no, they’ve got the _next_ eighty years for that. Tonight is all for him.

“You not even going to pretend to object to this?” he asks, teasing.

“Joker you are fully and intimately aware of just how much pleasure I am getting from this,” Batman says dryly. “There doesn’t seem much point denying anything when you’ve got my penis inside you and my blood all over your face.”

The laugh forces its way up out of Joker’s throat, stretching his face, shaking his whole body in a way that makes Bruce groan. It feels good in a way laughter hasn’t for a long time, pure and freeing and destabilizing, the way it should, the way it did before… everything. He feels like himself again, wholly and completely, for the first time since he realized he couldn’t make himself escape the cave. He feels ready to burn the whole world down around their ears, feels ready to take another acid bath, to reshape this complacent old city in his own image once again.

Bruce laughs, with him, small and self-deprecating. “I shouldn’t find that as attractive as I do,” he mutters, half to himself, and then he fixes Joker with one of those hot deep looks that feel like penetration all by themselves. “I want to taste my blood in your mouth.”

Tempting, but not actually possible while Bruce is tied down like this. “Later, I promise. Later you can lick my face clean like a cat if that’s what make you happy.”

Bruce laughs, and Joker had never, not in all his decades of dreaming, imagined he would be like this, happy and loving and unashamed of his own desire. It’s beautiful and intoxicating, and Joker wants him like this as often as either of them can bear it.

He sits up, shoves back onto Bruce’s hard cock, moaning for the too dry gritty slide of it, the feel of being reshaped by it. God he _wants_ , _needs_. Everything in him that’s still human is urging him to drop the razor, loose himself in fucking, give himself over to the most animal of instincts, but he wouldn’t be the Joker if he listened to those kinds of urges, so instead he sets the tip of the blade against Bruce’s chest and grins.

Beneath him Bruce shudders, tries to arch, tries to push closer to the blade, and that’s something else Joker has never imagined and he kind of hates himself for denying himself the image. Certainly he’s going to be seeing it in his dreams for the rest of his life.

“You really like this, huh Batsy?” he asks, voice breathy with desire. “Think I could make you come just from this?”

Bruce screws his eyes shut as he groans. “I think you’re going to find out if you get on with it,” he grits out.

Well, there’s motivation if ever he heard it.

He uses the cut he’s already made for the fifth vertical, cutting a line alongside it and then worrying it with the blade to make it deep enough to scar. The pain from that gets him a moan and a hard twitch of the cock inside him, sending it glancing off his prostate in a way that makes him swear.

He slashes the horizontal too quickly, moving onto the next letter before Bruce has had a chance to catch his breath, cutting fast and deep.

The beginning of the fifth letter gets his name, groaned out low and intent and gorgeous. The final stroke gets him another desperate attempt at a thrust, and the pleasure for that is more mental than physical but it still makes him gasp.

“Last one,” he murmurs, setting the blade against the skin. “Fast or slow?”

“I… Christ, Joker, I don’t _know_! I want this to be over and I never want it to end!”

Joker grins at him, amused by Bruce mirroring his own thoughts so perfectly. “Slow then. I want to savor this.”

He braces his free hand on Batsy’s chest, close enough to the existing cuts to make the skin tighten and pull painfully, and begins to cut the first letter, slow and careful as he knows how to be. Bruce gasps and shudders and makes a high desperate noise that Joker is going to be hearing in his _dreams_ and holds himself perfectly still, only the trembling in his shoulders giving away just how much he wants to be moving.

There’s a feeling that’s almost loss as Joker makes the final cut, but accomplishment too. Now Bruce is marked, owned and possessed and _kept_ every bit as much as Joker himself is, and that? That’s all Joker’s ever truly wanted. (Even in the moments when he wants nothing of the sort).

He licks the razor clean while Bruce watches him with avid hunger, considers and dismisses the temptation to slice his own tongue open to see what it would feel like, and finally _finally_ allows himself to rise up and slam himself back down onto Bruce’s gorgeous cock, fucking himself with ruthless pleasure because he _can_ , because he’s exactly that kind of selfish and it’s glorious.

Bruce is sweating, rolling his hips up as much as he can to meet Joker’s thrusts, gasping out his name between breathes as he stares at him with desperate unblinking eyes, clearly recording every moment of his.

“I want to feel you come inside me,” Joker tells him. “I want you to come first so I can ride you while you’re too sensitive to enjoy it.”

“I’d always enjoy it,” Bruce grits out, “even when I wish I didn’t, fuck, _Joker_!”

He made the Dark Knight swear, and that’s got to be worth a reward. He runs his fingers over the letters he’d carved, pulling and pushing and tearing, making Bruce shout with pained pleasure, his head thrashing as though he doesn’t know how to process all the things he’s feeling. He looks debauched and inhuman and violent and beautiful and Joker needs him to come because he’s getting so close…

He digs in with his short nails, scratches over Bruce’s nipples and the cuts above and below them, and says, “Come for me darling,” in as commanding a voice as he can manage when he’s three hard thrusts away from the best orgasm of his life.

“Joker, _Joker_ , I…” and Bruce is coming, head thrown back as he _bellows_ his way through an orgasm, cock grinding up into Joker’s sweet spot until he’s seeing stars, biting back a yell of his own. He will last, he can overrule his body, just a little longer, just…

He’s slamming himself down hard enough that walking is going to painful and he doesn’t care because he’s lighting up his whole body, making his limbs tingle and sending bolts of unbearably intense pleasure shooting up his spine, and everything is hot and hard and so overwhelming his thinks he might be going to cry again, but when he wraps a blood slick hand around his cock, when he clenches hard enough to make himself moan and Bruce almost scream with oversensitivity, what forces its’ way up from his belly is a laugh, high and desperate and the only way he knows how to express what he’s feeling as his balls tighten and his spine arches and his vision whites out with the force of his orgasm.

He’s trembling faintly, and his cock hurts – he seems to have gripped it rather unkindly while he rode out his wonderful orgasm – and the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes is his mark, carved into Bruce’s chest, the line of letters running diagonally up from under his right nipple to just over his left.

HA HA HA. The only signature the Joker has ever needed.

“You look lovely,” he tells Bruce, tearing his eyes away from the marks to study his face, the wild hair and swollen lips and desperate light in his eyes. “And thoroughly debauched. I suppose you expect me to let you up now?”

“Even if you intended to keep me as your sex slave, you’d have to untie me occasionally,” Bruce says, with that particular humor that is always covering some chink in his armor.

Joker doesn’t need to push or prod to know what this one is. The curtain is coming down, and it’s time for them to take their positions for the next act, and Bruce wants to make this moment last forever.

“I can’t do that, lamb chop. You know why.”

“I suspected. Is there anything I can say?”

Oh, Batsy, darling darling fool… “There never was. This is a tango, not a waltz.”

“You’re going to… kill people.”

What had be stopped himself from saying? Leave me, probably. All that denial he used to be so keen on seems to have dried up like the Kalahari once he realized Joker wasn’t going to stay with him forever. (Except in all the ways he is).

“Oh, almost certainly darling. And you’re going to try and stop me. And you might even have help for it. Don’t think I didn’t hear your and Scandal muttering about Superman’s brat and her new secret club.”

“You’re staying in Gotham?”

“Did you think I could leave?” This city has been his mother and his lover and his worst enemy, and he’ll never truly leave it, any more than he’ll leave the Batman. But that doesn’t need saying out loud. There’s been far too much of the mushy stuff, far too many nasty squiggling _confusing_ emotions.

He eases himself up and off Batman’s cock, grinning at the feel of come running down the backs of his thighs, and slides up the ridiculously huge body until he’s at an angle where he can comfortably bend down for the deep claiming _desperate_ kiss. Bruce’s tongue is warm and slick and the moment seems to stretch forever, but the music is swelling inside him, and his stage is awaiting him. He’s too much of a performer to ever be able to resist that kind of siren song.

The blow is carefully calculated. Batsy is hard to knock out, hard to even disorientate, his skull nearly as thick with ridges of healed bone as Joker’s, and so gentle won’t help. But he’s also bleeding, not terribly, but enough that Joker doesn’t want to leave him cold for more than the few minutes it takes to make his getaway. It would be a real shame if Brucey were to die without Joker having planned it. 

That’s the sorta thing you gotta savour, and it’s not the flavour he wants right now.

He dressed quickly, the purple pinstripe tailcoat that makes Bruce look at him with desperate longing, yellow shirt and green waistcoat, black and white saddle shoes, as close to his classic look as he has (appearances are going to be everything for what he has to do next).

He packs a bag with his other clothes, and a few of the more interesting toys, checks the chopstick has nearly burnt away, pockets the razor, some explosive charges, some nasty little sonic grenades small enough to fit in his shoe and a batarang, just for old time’s sake.

The last thing he does before saying goodbye to the place that’s been his home for thirty seven years is loosen the straps on Bruce’s wrists, just enough to give him leverage to free himself. He’ll probably still need to dislocate his thumb, but he wouldn’t want to make things easy for him.

He _doesn’t_ give Bruce’s unconscious form one last kiss, or lingering looks, or anything like that. He’s said his goodbyes and they’ll see each other soon enough.

There is one person though…

“Bye BC,” he says, voice rough with something he doesn’t have a name for. “It’s been good knowing ya toots. Look after him. And don’t… Don’t let this hurt you too much. You couldn’t have stopped it.”

And then there’s nothing to do but leave, climbing quickly and easily along the rock wall toward the waterfall door. He’s had the emergency overrides stored in the back of his head for years, and it’s less that a minute before he’s scrambling out into the soft grass of the Gotham hills.

Below him the city is a glittering jewel, a million tiny lights polluting the darkness and blotting out the predawn dark.

It’s late enough that it’s nearly early. He’s lingered too long over his fun. Now there’s work to be done and not enough time to do it in. But maybe if hurries, there might be time to meet that sweet little thing from the bar after their shift. What had the name been? Brey. Although they didn’t look like a Brey. To him, they’d looked more like a Harley.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gods, please don't hate me for this? I mean, I can't stop you, I kinda hate me for this, even knowing what comes next for them, but at least try and trust that I mostly know what I'm doing?
> 
> (Don't listen to me, I don't know what I'm doing, this series was supposed to be a cracky one shot and now it's a complete AU and I have a hella complex timeline and too many original characters and I'm trying to work out church services for people who basically worship the Joker. I'm in way over my head.)
> 
> Comments are always lovely, and let me know you're not too angry about the new developements.

**Author's Note:**

> Please please comment. Nothing brightens my day more than someone taking the time to talk to be about my fics, even if it's only a couple of words.
> 
> Also a minor note, anyone know if NavyOwl changed their username or something? I haven't heard anything from them in a while. The Batjokes fandom is too small to loose members!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Marked Your Card](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10768812) by [melody1987](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melody1987/pseuds/melody1987)




End file.
